MICHAEL FOOT: Prime Minister and great nephew lead tributes at funeral

Pictures: Camden New Journal

Monday March 15, 2010

By RICHARD OSLEY

PRIME Minister Gordon Brown, former Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock and the New Journal's assistant editor Tom Foot were among the speakers at a moving funeral service for Michael Foot this afternoon.

Around 150 mourners listened to stories of Foot, the journalist turned politician who led the Labour Party between 1980 and 1983. More than 50 more listened to the service from speakers and a television screens outside Golders Green Crematorium in Hoop Lane. 

Mr Foot's coffin was brought into the chapel with red roses - the emblem of the Labour Party - and a green and black Plymouth Argyle scarf.

Tom Foot, who lived with Mr Foot, his great uncle, in Hampstead, told the chapel: "I can still hear that voice, rising and falling with its unmistakable lilt. One of the last things Michael said to me came in surreal circumstances sitting  by his side in that front room at around 1 in the morning and during a difficult period at the end of his life, agitated and frustrated, he bellowed: I will go on protesting'. 'Like we'd expect anything less, I said. And he rocked back and a little smile of approval crept across his face'.

Tom, who described his great uncle's home in Pilgrim's Lane as a house made of books, said: "He inspired a sense of selflessness in the people who knew him. He always made you feel better, put a spring in your step."

Among those at the service were Frank Dobson, Ed Miliband, Peter Hain, Harriet Harman, Melvyn Bragg, Jon Snow, Alastair Campbell, Fiona Millar, Cherie Blair, and the New Journal's literary editor Illtyd Harrington, the former deputy chairman of the GLC. More than 50 members of Foot's extended family were also present.

Lord Kinnock said: "Michael's religion was humanity, his country was the world. He is dead now but the memory of him endures to illuminate all our lives. His great soul goes striding on." The finale was a singing of The Red Flag. The wake was held this afternoon at Keats House.

* Mr Snow, the Channel 4 newsreader who lives in Kentish Town, said on his Snowblog afterwards: "It was undoubtedly a passing. And one in which speaker after speaker retrieved the words of Swift, Byron and more. Gordon Brown quoted Cicero as did Foot’s stepdaughter Julie, whom Foot called Judy all her adult life. Foot’s grandnephew Tom described only a month ago Michael Foot making his courageous dissent of the 50 staircases of his house and arriving at the breakfast table to exclaim about the boiled egg awaiting him: “'It’s the best I have ever eaten – ever'”